Damage assessment of large-scale structures (e.g., bridges, buildings, or dams) after an extreme event such as an earthquake or a blast load is a challenging task. In many cases, critical damage is not visible or obvious, human inspection poses serious life-safety concerns, and downtime for the structure results in large economic losses.

Dr. Todd and other researchers at UC San Diego, with partners in the Computer Science and Engineering Department, California Institute for Telecommunications & Information Technology (Calit2), and the Los Alamos National Laboratory, are developing components for a new systems approach that combines Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) -based wireless sensing, advanced networking and embedded system architectures, and autonomous network interrogation via unmanned platforms such as robots or unmanned UAV.

The unmanned platforms are programmed to move to and query these wireless sensor networks and compute features that would facilitate structural health assessments after such extreme events.